The conventional procedures for renting an automobile often turn into slow, frustrating experiences for a rental customer. These undesirable experiences result, at least in part, from the relatively large amount of information that must be exchanged between the rental customer and, for example, an automobile rental agency. An exchange of a larger amount of information causes a rental transaction to require a greater period of time. Moreover, rental agencies are encouraged to minimize the number of personnel available to engage in exchanging such information in order to hold operating costs as low as possible. Thus, rental customers often wait until rental agency personnel are available before a rental agreement transaction commences.
This problem is aggravated around airports. Commercial air travelers represent a substantial class of rental agency customers. Moreover, commercial air flights tend to be concentrated around common times of the day so that a large number of rental customers appear at a rental agency at once. Consequently, many customers are forced to wait in long lines before they can receive a rental automobile.
For a rental customer, any waiting period is typically an unproductive, unwanted, and frustrating time. In connection with planning an itinerary which involves both commercial air travel and rental of an automobile, time must be allotted for potential delays in renting an automobile, in addition to potential delays associated with commercial air travel. The sum of such potential delays often causes a rental customer to take earlier flights than would otherwise be required if a relatively certain, minimal delay to rent an automobile could be reasonably expected. Consequently, minimization of waiting time improves the rental agreement transaction and improves efficiency in allocating a rental customer's time.
In fact, many rental and travel agencies have established procedures which attempt to minimize this waiting time. However, such procedures often rely on making prior arrangements for specific automobiles and on utilizing the same rental agency personnel who must engage in obtaining information from many rental customers. Consequently, such procedures often fail to adequately minimize delay due to mistakes, overloading of rental agency personnel, or to a lack of an opportunity to make such prior arrangements in a customer's busy schedule.
In addition, rental agencies are now installing cellular mobile radiotelephones (CMRs) in rental automobiles so that their customers may purchase CMR services. Such CMRs are often equipped with a device which reads credit or charge cards and with the requisite intelligence to process credit-card payment of CMR service, so that the customer may accept billing and accounting responsibility prior to being provided with the CMR service. However, heretofore credit-card CMRs installed in rental automobiles have not been useful to aid in transferring the information required by a rental transaction. Consequently, they currently fail to help in minimizing the undesirable delays currently experienced by rental customers.